The major reason why shared hosting is cheap for new beginners is that the cost of server maintenance is distributed among the different customers whose websites have been hosted on that server. Hence, hosting providers created this service to allow users with limited budgets to start hosting their websites on the internet.
At HostAdvice, Our experts have engaged in real-life performance testing of dozens of shared hosting providers to help you choose the best for your new website. They reviewed each service provider by purchasing their shared hosting plans and reported based on their experiences. They tested the basic features such as reliability and a money-back guarantee, which were categorized under important ranking parameters to bring you the top 9 shared hosting providers.
For more insight on shared hosting pricing, check out our Shared Hosting Pricing Page.
Key Points to Consider When Choosing Cheap Shared Hosting
- Choose shared hosting whenever you want to host small or low traffic websites.
- Make sure the shared hosting provider offers a user-friendly cPanel with a 1-click installer for WordPress and other applications.
- Ensure the shared hosting plan includes a perfect blend of resources and features to start your web hosting journey
- Choose a shared hosting provider with an uptime guarantee of 99.9% above.
- Consider if the hosting provider offers responsive customer support.
Our Top Cheap Shared Hosting Providers (Bought and Tested)
Hostens’ shared hosting plans offer the perfect blend of affordability, features, and performance in one neat package. Even though Hostens is one of the cheapest shared hosting providers on the market, it doesn’t skimp out on features and services, making it the best cheap shared hosting provider overall. What’s best, it’s excellent for beginners and offers a 30-day money-back guarantee you can use to get a full refund if it doesn’t satisfy your needs.
- Overall Score: 4.4
- Pricing: 4.6
- Features: 4.3
- Performance: 4.4
- Support: 4.4
- User Friendly: 4.5
Pricing: With Hostens, you can get a shared hosting plan for as low as $2/month (on a three-year billing period). The plan includes 10GB of storage, a free domain, 1TB of bandwidth, and hosting for 10 websites.
Features: With Hostens, you’ll enjoy features like a free domain, a free DNS manager, a free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate, a free website builder, cPanel, daily/weekly backups, SSH access, Cloudflare Railgun, malware removal, PHP, Ruby, Python, and more.
Performance: Hostens offers a 99.95% uptime guarantee, promising to keep your website up 8756 out of 8760 hours per year. Also, it uses fast-paced ECC REG RAM to function, SSD RAID storage, and enterprise-grade Intel Xeon processors.
Support: Hostens users get 24/7 customer support via live chat, a ticketing system, and email. Also, as a Hostens user, you’ll get access to a vast knowledge base with many guides and tutorials.
User Friendly: Hostens uses cPanel as its default control panel on its shared hosting plans. cPanel is easy to use and allows you to manage everything in one place. Also, you’ll get an Installatron” tool that allows you to install, update, and back up more than 100 scripts and CMS easily.
Pros & Cons
Pros:
- Cheap shared hosting plans that come with great features.
- A 99.95% uptime guarantee and servers that use enterprise-grade hardware.
- An easy-to-use and intuitive dashboard.
Cons:
- Not many options for developers (but it can still be used to host more complex web projects).
ChemiCloud offers reliable shared hosting plans optimized with their Cloud hosting infrastructure to ensure your website’s data is secured in the Cloud with advanced DDoS mitigation. We like that they offer 7 data center locations for fast connectivity and low latency. They also partnered with Cloudflare CDN to ensure your site loads faster no matter where the request is from.
- Overall Score: 5.0
- Features: 5.0
- Reliability: 5.0
- User Friendly: 5.0
- Support: 5.0
- Pricing: 4.9
With their simple website builder, you can just drag and drop, choose out of 350+ templates, and use their responsive design to publish a user-friendly website. You can also use their free website migration tool to transfer your website from any host. If you are unhappy with their service delivery, they have a 45 days guarantee to refund your money without any questions or delay.
Features (5.0): ChemiCloud offers an easy and affordable shared hosting package with a perfect blend of features. You will get cPanel access, free CDN, 1-click installs, simple website builder, Litespeed web server, free 1-year domain registration, unlimited MySQL database, web application firewall, malware detection and removal, application auto-updates, multiple PHP versions, and more!
Reliability (5.0): They understand that uptime is better than downtime with a 99.99% uptime guarantee, so you don’t have to worry about your website not being available for your customers.
User-Friendly (5.0): You can manage and simplify your website with cPanel access to manage domains, add users, organize website files, and install & deploy your website with cPanel tools.
Support (5.0): Peace of mind comes with their shared hosting plans. You will get support from a technical team that cares. They will solve any complex technical issues you might have to keep your website live. You can reach them via live chat and a 10-minute response ticket.
Pricing (4.9): Choose a shared hosting plan to host your website with easy-to-use cPanel on a reliable Cloud infrastructure. Here is a breakdown of their cheap shared hosting plans and renewal costs:
- Starter: $4.48/month – 1 Website, 20 GB NVMe Storage, 10 Days Backups, 25,000 monthly visits, 1 CPU core, 1 GB RAM, and 250,000 inodes. Renews at $9.99/month.
- Pro: $5.23/month – Unlimited Websites, 30 GB NVMe Storage, 20 Days Backups, 50,000 monthly visits, 2 CPU cores, 2 GB RAM, and 350,000 inodes. Renews at $14.95/month
- Turbo: $6.98/month – Unlimited Websites, 40 GB NVMe Storage, 30 Days Backups, 100,000 monthly visits, 3 CPU cores, 3 GB RAM, and 500,000 inodes. Renews at $19.95/month.
PROS:
- Reliable Cloud infrastructure with 99.99% uptime guarantee.
- Fast website speed with free CDN, server-level caching and SSD storage
- Low latency across 8 data center locations
- Free website migration from any hosting provider
- 45 days money back guarantee
CONS:
- Expensive starting price compared to other shared hosting providers.
Get your websites hosted with HostArmada shared hosting plans with the perfect balance between price, resources, features and global reach. We like that they offer cloud-shared hosting packages to start your hosting journey, extend your website availability, and improve the loading speed. When you choose their managed cloud shared hosting packages, they will handle the health and website updates to optimize your hosting experience and let you worry less.
- Overall Score: 4.9
- Features: 4.9
- Reliability: 4.9
- User Friendly: 4.9
- Support: 5.0
- Pricing: 4.9
You can deploy your WordPress websites on their shared hosting plan with a 1-click installer and user-friendly cPanel to steer your website customization in the right direction. HostArmada ensures your data is secured with SSD cloud storage combined with battery-powered RAID controllers when you choose any of their Cloud SSD shared hosting packages. Plus, you will get tight website security backed by innovative AI-based security technologies to protect your website from dangerous web attacks.
Experience fast website speed and loading times with their intuitive caching mechanism optimized to experience minimum resource usage footprint. This means you will get more website visitors even on the cheapest plans. You will also get free malware scan and removal plus AI based web application firewall to protect your websites.
Features (4.9): The most important features are one click away when you order a Cloud SSD shared hosting plan. You will get free website transfer, free domain, free SSL, 1-click WordPress install, free drag&drop site builder, free-loading speed optimization, unlimited FTP accounts, unlimited databases, multiple PHP versions, unlimited email accounts, unlimited sub-domains, web server cache and more!
Reliability (4.9): Their cloud SSD technology guarantees a 99.9% uptime. Plus, they don’t overcrowd their servers and allocate a low number of customers to a server for optimal website performance.
User-Friendly (4.9): As a HostArmada customer, you have access to managed shared SSD packages, ensuring you don’t have to worry about your website update and other technical tasks.
Support (5.0): Their technical support team is available 24/7 to help you migrate your website, install themes & plugins, and optimize your website.
Pricing (4.9): HostArmada’s cloud-shared hosting packages were created with care to help you optimize your website. Here is a breakdown of their shared hosting plans, specifications and renewal costs:
- Start Dock: $2.49/month – 1 website, 15 GB SSD storage, 2 Cores CPU, 2 GB RAM, and 7 daily backups. Renews at $9.95/month.
- Web Warp: $3.74/month – Unlimited websites, 30 GB SSD storage, 4 Cores CPU, 4 GB RAM, and 14 daily backups. Renews at $14.9/month.
- Speed Reaper: $4.49/month – Unlimited websites, 40 GB SSD storage, 6 Cores CPU, 6 GB RAM, and 21 daily backups. Renews at $17.9/month.
PROS
- Valuable free and unlimited features at cheap prices
- Offers managed shared hosting packages
- Tight website security
- 24/7 technical support
- User-friendly cPanel and website builder
CONS
- Some features like dynamic caching, speed reaper and Litespeed web server are restricted to the highest shared hosting package.
Experience the difference when you choose A2 hosting to host your websites on the internet. You will get up to 20x faster page load times to boost your SEO rankings and conversion with low bounce rates. We like that their shared hosting plans are fast and fine-tuned for your needs.
- Overall Score: 4.7
- Features: 4.7
- Reliability: 4.7
- User Friendly: 4.7
- Support: 4.7
- Pricing: 4.6
To help you experience optimum website performance, they limit the number of clients allocated on a shared server with optimized website speeds. A2 hosting utilizes top-of-the-line servers to power their shared hosting plans. You can also get 40x faster CPU performance, advanced Litespeed Turbo Caching, and 3x faster NVMe storage when you choose their turbo shared hosting package.
Features (4.7): You will get features like unlimited transfer, easy cPanel control panel, website staging, free website builder, unlimited websites, unlimited databases, unlimited email accounts, reinforced DDoS protection, and more!
Reliability (4.7): They provide ultra-reliable servers with a 99.9% uptime guarantee.
User-Friendly (4.7): As an A2 hosting customer, you will get cheap shared hosting plans with an easy cPanel control panel to build your website with A2 site builder.
Support (4.7): 24/7/365 live chat, phone and email support.
Pricing (4.6): A2 hosting offer blazing fast and low-cost shared hosting plans. Here is a breakdown of their shared hosting plans, prices and specifications:
- Startup: $2.99/month – 1 website, 100 GB RAID SSD storage, 1 GB memory, and 5 databases. Renews at $10.99/month.
- Drive: $5.99/month – 1 GB memory, unlimited websites, unlimited SSD storage, and unlimited databases.
- Turbo boost: $6.99/month – 2 GB memory, Unlimited websites, unlimited SSD storage,, and unlimited databases.
- Turbo Max: $12.99/month – 4 GB memory, Unlimited websites, unlimited SSD storage,, and unlimited databases.
PROS
- Up to 20x faster turbo and 40x CPU performance.
- Free server rewind data backup protection
- Turbo servers can handle up to 9x more traffic.
- Provides enhanced processing power to reduce bottlenecks
CONS
- More website performance features are restricted to turbo plans.
IONOS is a cheap shared hosting provider that takes security very seriously. Not only does it offer top-notch security features in its hosting plans, but it also guards its physical data centers heavily, leaving nothing to chance. So, if security is your primary concern when looking for cheap web hosting, then IONOS is the one.
- Overall Score: 3.9
- Pricing: 3.9
- Features: 3.5
- Performance: 4.3
- Support: 4.0
- User Friendly: 3.8
Pricing: IONOS’ shared hosting plans start at $1/month and come with a 30-day money-back guarantee. The $1/month plan includes hosting for unlimited websites, unlimited storage, unlimited databases, and up to 6GB of RAM.
Features: IONOS offers many features, but some of them include Site Scan, DDoS protection, geo-redundancy, SiteAnalytics, a free SSL certificate, daily backups and recovery, PHP, HTTP/2, gzip, free professional email, a free domain for the first year, and more.
Performance: IONOS uses dual-platform technology and keeps its web servers and storage on the same platform for faster performance. Also, it comes with a 99.9% uptime guarantee.
Support: This web host offers award-winning customer support, available via phone and live chat. It also offers many useful tutorials, guides, and articles.
User Friendly: IONOS has a “Deploy Now” feature that you can use while you are creating your website. It allows you to get your site online in three easy steps. In addition, you’ll get an intuitive custom control panel.
Pros & Cons
Pros:
- A beginner-friendly custom control panel.
- Affordable prices with reliable uptime.
- Full-stack security features that will keep you and your visitors safe.
Cons:
- Not the most reliable customer support (but coupled with the tutorials and guides, you likely won’t experience many issues).
FastComet offers all the important features you need to drive your website performance on their shared hosting packages. You can access cPanel and softaculous for easy point-and-click management of your hosting environment. We like that they offer a perfect blend between cost and performance on FastCloud shared hosting to enjoy a top-rated hosting solution for your small or personal website.
- Overall Score: 4.8
- Features: 4.8
- Reliability: 4.8
- User Friendly: 4.8
- Support: 4.9
- Pricing: 4.7
With SSD-only Cloud, FastComet ensures you experience 300% faster access to your website files and databases. Plus, you can allow their migrations experts to help you move your website files, databases and emails at no extra cost. They also offer a free Cloudflare CDN to help you distribute your content to your website visitors from different parts of the world, thereby increasing your data transfer rate.
On top of that, you will enjoy 100% customer satisfaction with a 45 days money-back guarantee available to allow you to try their shared hosting service and decide if it is what you need long term. Their shared hosting plans come fully packed with website starter kits, including 350+ free templates, 1-click WordPress install, unlimited email accounts, free drag and drop site builder, free app installs and upgrades, and 24/7 human support.
Features (4.8): FastComet offers features you will fall in love with and help achieve a website performance that will exceed your expectations. You will get important features like Let’s Encrypt SSL, BitNinja server security, unlimited databases, unlimited sub-domains, free daily backups, multiple PHP versions, unlimited FTP accounts, free domain transfer, and more!
Reliability (4.8): Provides up to 300% faster access to your databases and website files plus a 99.9% uptime guarantee.
User-Friendly (4.8): As a FastComet customer, you have access to a powerful cPanel for easy management of your websites from your hosting account.
Support (4.9): FastComet cares about the performance of your website. They provide 24/7 technical support to ensure you have a seamless shared hosting experience.
Pricing (4.7): FastComet offers advanced website performance and flexibility on a cheap and reasonable budget. Here is a breakdown of their shared hosting plans, prices and specifications:
- FastCloud: $2.49/month – Single website, 15 GB SSD storage, 25,000 unique visits per month, 2 CPU cores, 2 GB RAM and 1 free website transfer. Renews at $9.95/month
- FastCloud Plus: $3.70/month – Multiple websites, 25 GB SSD storage, 50,000 unique visits per month, 4 CPU cores, 3 GB RAM and 3 free website transfers. Renews at $14.95/month.
- FastCloud Extra: $4.99/month – Multiple websites, 35 GB SSD storage, 100,000 unique visits per month, 6 CPU cores, 6 GB RAM and 3 free website transfers. Renews at $19.95/month.
FastComet also offers 7/30 daily backups on their shared hosting packages with full unrestricted access via the 1-click restore manager. You can also ask for help from their technical support team via live chat, phone, and email in case you need an extra hand to assist you in restoring your website at no extra cost.
PROS
- Offers a perfect blend of resources and features
- Instant 24/7 human support
- 45 days money back guarantee
- Fair usage of website traffic quota
- Custom optimized server setup and user-friendly cPanel
CONS
- Rocket booster is available only on the highest plan
- Expensive renewal prices
NameHero is all about the cloud. All of its shared hosting are cloud-based, providing super-fast speeds and enhanced performance. Also, it helps that NameHero uses LiteSpeed web servers to boost its performance even further, providing you with affordable yet fast shared hosting. The provider also comes with a website builder and offers domains, allowing you to get everything you need for your website in one place.
- Overall Score: 4.4
- Pricing: 4.4
- Features: 4.4
- Performance: 4.5
- Support: 4.5
- User Friendly: 4.4
Pricing: NameHero offers four shared hosting plans, starting at $4.48/month for hosting for one website, 10,000 monthly visits, 1GB of RAM, and unlimited NVMe storage. All of NameHero’s shared hosting plans come with a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Features: With NameHero’s shared hosting plans, you’ll get fast-paced NVMe storage, cPanel, an SSL certificate, free website migrations, LiteSpeed web server, LiteSpeed cache, unlimited bandwidth, 1-click WordPress hosting, jailed SSH access, Quic.Cloud CDN, nightly/weekly backups, and more.
Performance: NameHero offers fast loading speeds and performance and uses NVMe storage and LiteSpeed web servers which are much faster than Apache and Nginx. Also, it comes with a 99.99% uptime guarantee and Quick.Cloud CDN.
Support: NameHero’s SuperHero support team is available at all times via live chat and email. The team offers fast responses and is Level III Support-ready. In addition, the provider has a Help Center with many written guides and tutorials.
User Friendly: All of NameHero’s shared hosting plans come with cPanel. Also, you’ll get 1-click WordPress hosting and a drag-and-drop website builder.
Pros & Cons
Pros:
- Fast page loads and great performance powered by LiteSpeed and NVMe.
- Many free features are included in the plans.
- Easy-to-use drag-and-drop website builder – HeroBuilder.
Cons:
- Pricier than the other providers on our list (but offers great value for money).
With HostGator’s shared hosting plans, you can look forward to Unmetered bandwidth and lots of extra features. Not only that, but you can also expect affordable prices and stable performance too. They also provide an easy-to-use drag-and-drop site builder and a user-friendly dashboard, making it accessible to users of all skill levels.
- Overall Score: 3.7
- Pricing: 3.8
- Features: 3.8
- Performance: 3.7
- Support: 3.6
- User Friendly: 3.8
Pricing: HostGator’s entry-level shared hosting plan costs $3.75/month and includes hosting for one website, unmetered bandwidth, 10GB of storage, and unlimited email addresses.
Features: HostGator’s shared hosting plans come packed with features such as a free domain for the first year, free domain transfers, one-click WordPress installs, auto-renewed SSL, cPanel, SpamAssassin, advanced email tools, website statistics tools, expert management tools, and more.
Performance: With HostGator, you’ll get a 99.9% uptime guarantee and overall excellent performance. The provider uses top-notch hardware for its servers and has data centers in the US.
Support: HostGator offers great customer support with fast response times and 24/7 availability. You can reach HostGator’s customer support team via phone, live chat, and Twitter.
User Friendly: cPanel is the native control panel that comes with HostGator’s shared hosting plans. You’ll also get Softaculous one-click installs for a wide range of apps and management tools that will help you manage your site.
Pros & Cons
Pros:
- Unlimited services and many free features are included in all shared hosting plans.
- Suitable for personal and business websites.
- Accessible to users of all skill levels.
Cons:
- No servers outside the US (but by activating Cloudflare, you will get great performance from anywhere).
Verpex is a unique shared hosting provider with reasonably priced packages to host your websites with fast loading speeds and no downtime. We like that they offer unlimited free migrations to transfer your websites to Verpex and an instant server setup to allow you to take your website online and attract visitors. Plus, they offer free domain registration and transfer, which is not included in your billing cycle and is available for most TLDs like .com, .net and .org.
- Overall Score: 4.9
- Features: 4.8
- Reliability: 4.9
- User Friendly: 4.9
- Support: 4.9
- Pricing: 4.8
Verpex says they offer a 45-day money-back guarantee because they are confident in the quality of their shared hosting plans. Their confidence is perhaps justified as they include a LiteSpeed web server on all plans to increase the performance and scalability of their shared hosting plans with a minimum usage of server resources such as storage space, memory and CPU. In case you mess up on your website, Verpex has got your back with automatic daily backups. This means you can restore your website files from the last 30 days.
Features (4.8): Verpex grants their customers access to features like cPanel, Softaculous, unlimited bandwidth, free migration, free SSL certificate, free domain registration, unlimited email accounts, unlimited number of Inodes, spam protection, Litespeed web server, WP CLI, Remote MySQL Access, SSH access, IP address blocking and more!
Reliability (4.9): They guarantee an uptime of 99.99%.
User-Friendly (4.9): You will get 100% customer satisfaction at reasonably cheap prices and instant server setup with cPanel, Imunify360, SitePad Sitebuilder, Cloudlinux, and Jetbackup.
Support (4.9): As a Verpex customer, you will get a friendly team of hosting experts available round the clock to ensure a seamless hosting experience. You can reach them via live chat and phone.
Pricing (4.8): Verpex clearly showed that cheap doesn’t mean low-quality service. Here is a breakdown of their plans, prices, specifications and renewal costs:
- Bronze: $0.60/month – 1 website, 1 vCPU, 1 GB LVE memory, and 50 GB SSD storage. Renews at $5.99/month.
- Silver: $0.99/month – 5 websites, 2 vCPU cores, 2GB LVE memory limit, and 100 GB SSD storage. Renews at $9.99/month.
- Gold: $1.50/month – 10 websites, 2 vCPU cores, 2 GB LVE memory limit and unlimited SSD disk space. Renews at $14.99/month.
PROS
- Cheap shared hosting prices
- Instant server setup
- 9 data center locations
- 24/7 expert technical support with 99% support case resolution
CONS
- 99.5% uptime guarantee is low compared to its competitors.
Ranking comparison between the Top Providers
Cheap Shared Hosting – Final Recommendations
As a beginner, it can be hard and confusing to choose out of hundreds of cheap shared hosting providers. To save you stress and time, our top 9 cheap shared hosting providers are the best place to start. Learning how shared hosting plans work and why you need one to get started is essential to help you choose your first cheap shared hosting plan.
Most of the shared hosting providers on our top 9 list offer a perfect blend of resources and features at a cheap price to allow you to host your website and connect with your customers online. No matter how unlimited the resources or features might appear, you still share CPU power, storage space, RAM and other resources with other websites or users. Shared hosting is just a foundation to start hosting your small or new website.
As time goes on, your website will outgrow the resources of a shared server, and you might be required to upgrade to a VPS or Dedicated hosting.
How do we rank, and how should you choose your Cheap Shared Hosting?
Shared hosting is cheap because the cost of server maintenance and resources are shared among different websites and users. Hence, it offers new websites a perfect start in their web hosting journey. Our in-house web hosting experts went ahead to test different shared hosting providers to select the top 9 cheap shared hosting providers based on ranking factors such as user reviews, scaling potential, features, starting price and others.
Our Ranking Factors
- User reviews30%
- Performance and reliability10%
- Types of hosting offered5%
- Customer support10%
- Site speed8%
- Bandwidth and storage3%
- Traffic volume4%
- Scaling potential4%
- Features included10%
- Ease of use4%
- Starting price4%
- Money back guarantee3%
- Other factors5%
At HostAdvice, we rely on thousands of user reviews and continually update our review methodologies to reflect the new technologies and hosting updates. You will notice that we allocated certain percentages to our ranking factors based on their importance in the overall score. Hence, we considered the quality of shared hosting plans before the price plus real-time performance and testing to bring you the top 9 cheap shared hosting providers.
To help you understand and get a glimpse of how our experts conducted their research, we will explain under each factor what they considered and what you need to know before choosing a shared hosting provider.
Here are the factors we deployed on our AI technology to rank the top 9 cheap shared hosting providers:
Bandwidth and storage: Does the hosting provider offer sufficient storage and bandwidth? Can the allotted resources withstand your website traffic? Does the hosting provider offer unlimited or unmetered bandwidth? Do they use fast SSD drives to speed up your website? You need to know if a hosting provider is committed to ensuring you experience ultra-fast website speeds with sufficient resources. Storage must be sufficient to ensure your website files have enough room on the server, while bandwidth determines the data transfer rate between the server and your website visitors requests.
Customer support: Does the hosting provider offer technical support to help you migrate your websites? Are they available round the clock to attend to your questions? Technical assistance should be easily accessible at a moment’s notice. You need to ensure the hosting provider offers reliable and award-winning customer support. Plus, you should be able to get help via live chat, email, phone and ticket or fill out a form system.
Ease of use: It will be hard to start your hosting journey if the hosting provider doesn’t provide an easy setup process to create, design and host your website with their 1-click installs. Hence, you need to check if they guarantee a fast and smooth setup process with additional information from tutorials, knowledgebase, and technical help to help you migrate your website from another host.
Features included: Does the shared hosting provider offer major features to start? A good shared hosting provider should offer speed optimization tools, security features, unlimited support to help you get the best hosting experience. Look out for features like DDoS protection, free WHOIS privacy, free SSL certificates, firewall protection, virus and malware removal tools, easy-to-use cPanel, and more.
Money back guarantee: Does the shared hosting provider offer a reasonable money back guarantee in case you change your mind? Is the refund duration enough to evaluate if you want to commit long-term or cancel? Most shared hosting providers offer a minimum of 30 days money back guarantee, while you can get up to 97 days with some providers like Dreamhost.
Performance and reliability: Does the shared hosting provider offer a minimum uptime guarantee of 99.9%? Do they have enough data centers with ultra-low latency? Will you get fast connectivity tools to speed up your website? Uptime and website speed determine how a website will perform on the internet. It is important to confirm if the shared hosting provider is truly reliable by checking user reviews to confirm first-hand their performance and guarantees
Scaling potential: Every website hosted on a shared hosting plan will at one time outgrow the allotted resources. Hence, it is important to check if the shared hosting provider allows scalability whenever you need to upgrade to a bigger plan or other web hosting.
User reviews: This is based on real-life testing by users who have bought and tested shared hosting plans and dropped reviews based on their experience using their services. You can use this factor to evaluate a host and decide if you want to use their cheap shared hosting package.
What is Shared hosting, and who is it for?
Shared hosting is a type of web hosting where multiple websites are hosted on a physical server, and the hosting provider shares the server resources partitioned and allocated to each website. Shared hosting is customized to accommodate and operate more than one website on a server.
Every website hosted on a server is publicly accessible to any user whenever they type in the website’s URL in a browser. Then, the browser requests information from the server where the website files are stored, and the page requested can load within 2 seconds or less.
Shared hosting is recommended for new businesses, personal blogs or small websites with less traffic. Shared hosting is cheap because the cost of server maintenance is taken care of by the hosting provider, but you might have to compete for resources if the host allocates too many websites to a physical server. So it’s important to check that your hosting provider guarantees they do not oversell the server space.
Benefits of Shared Hosting
If you are a beginner looking to host your small business websites, blogs, portfolios, personal sites and database-driven sites, here are some of the benefits you will enjoy.
- You will get cheap and budget-friendly web hosting to start your hosting journey.
- Free domain name registration
- You can get unlimited resources and features with some hosts to boost your website performance.
- It is flexible and easy to upgrade without hassle as your site grows
- The hosting provider professionally manages the server maintenance.
- It allows users to host multiple domains and dynamic websites
- It allows customization of server resources based on your specific needs
- It guarantees a minimum uptime of 99.9%
Shared Hosting compared to other Web Hosting
Now that we know what shared hosting is and who needs it, let’s compare it to other types of web hosting like WordPress hosting, VPS hosting, Cloud hosting and Dedicated hosting.
Shared hosting vs WordPress hosting
These types of hosting are like twins. Shared hosting plans can do almost everything you can on WordPress hosting, except that WordPress is optimized to support WordPress websites only. Shared hosting comes with 1-click installs required to deploy content management systems like WordPress, Joomla, Magento, and others.
Therefore, most hosting providers allocate the same amount of resources as on a shared hosting plan to customize their WordPress hosting. But, WordPress hosting can be an upgrade to shared hosting for users who want to deploy their websites on the most popular content management system. You will have access to manage your websites and account with full root access, which you might not get on a shared hosting plan.
Shared hosting vs VPS hosting
VPS hosting is essentially an upgrade for users who have outgrown shared hosting resources. The main difference between these two is that a shared hosting package is already customized and doesn’t allow you to customize your own resources. While with VPS, you can have an option to customize your own server resources based on your website needs.
Security is secure and stable on both shared hosting and VPS hosting, but there is a slight difference. With shared hosting, your website might experience downtime or slow down if there is an error and too much traffic on another website on the same server. However, VPS hosting helps you avoid this as each server is partitioned at the OS level; therefore, each website will work differently without affecting the other’s performance.
Sharing hosting vs Cloud hosting
In terms of pricing, shared hosting is the most affordable, but the resources are shared. Cloud hosting is expensive for new beginners, but it offers a cluster of servers which prevents your website from experiencing any downtime. When one of the servers is down, another server picks up and responds to your website requests.
Cloud hosting comes out on top in terms of scalability; it allows the cluster of servers to act as one system through virtualization. While shared hosting allows you to scale resources, there is a limit to the number of allotted resources you can get on a shared server.
Shared hosting vs Dedicated hosting
With dedicated hosting, you can rent an entire physical server to manage your high-traffic website at a premium price. The only advantage shared hosting has over dedicated hosting is the cheap price. Aside from that, dedicated hosting comes out on top in terms of security, server resources, and website performance. However, shared hosting is beginner friendly and is a perfect place for new websites to start their web hosting journey.
How Much Does Cheap Shared Hosting Cost?
We all know that shared hosting is economical and affordable for new website users. It offers everything you need to get started at a cheap price, starting from $0.60 to $47.99/month. The cost of cheap shared hosting plans depends on the hosting provider, the resources allocated, the features, your website needs and more!
Extra costs like domain registration, WHOIS privacy, and Premium SSL certificate also affect the final shared hosting cost. Consider affordability before choosing a shared hosting plan. You shouldn’t spend too much on a shared hosting plan because it is only customized to get you started with hosting your website on the internet.
Choose your shared hosting plan not by the price offered but by researching how your shared hosting provider manages the server users and the number of websites or users allowed on a server. This will help get optimum performance for the price you pay.
What to Look for in a Shared Hosting Provider
To choose a shared hosting provider, you need to consider many factors, but we will focus more on the important ones so you can easily pick the best cheap shared hosting provider for your website. Consider the following factors before choosing a shared hosting provider:
Customer support: If you are new to web hosting or don’t possess great technical skills, look out for shared hosting providers that offer 24/7 reliable customer support. This means you can get technical help if you need to ask questions about the next step to set up and host your website. Also, make sure they are available via live chat, phone and email for prompt response to your requests.
Security: Ensure the shared hosting provider has implemented security features like DDoS protection, malware scanning and removal that will protect your website data from cyberattacks.
Server resources: Consider a shared hosting provider that offers a perfect blend of resources optimized by the latest technology. Most hosting providers offer unlimited resources to allow you to get started with hosting your websites on the internet. The catch here is you can get top-quality service without spending much. Hence, compare the resources and prices on a shared hosting plan across different hosts to understand which of them truly cares about your success.
Domain name: Some shared hosting providers will offer you free 1-year domain registration, while others require you to pay between $7.99 – $20 per year to register a new domain name in your preferred TLDs. If you are on a limited budget, it is advisable to go for a shared hosting provider that offers free domain to save cost.
Uptime: Most hosting providers guarantee an uptime of 99.9% above, but in reality, not all of them can deliver that consistently. Hence, look for user reviews to confirm if they commit to the guarantee or order one of their plans and monitor the uptime on your website.
Money-back guarantees: Consider only shared hosting providers that fully trust the quality of their service delivery and back it up with a refund in case you are not satisfied or changed your mind. Most cheap shared hosting providers offer between 30 – 97 days money-back guarantee.
Scalability: It’s convenient if the hosting provider offers multiple shared hosting plans you can upgrade to whenever your website outgrows the current plan. Hence, look out for shared hosting plans that work with scalable resources.